Wicked Wednesday: The Devil In Reverse

 

I decided to do something a little different today. I drew a Tarot card to ruminate on and got the Devil in reverse. The card is from the International Icon Tarot.

The card represents the critical factor for the issue at hand. The Devil, when reversed: Resistance of temptation. Freedom from bondage. The pursuit of higher goals despite the influence of luxury and pleasure. Release from obsession with money and power. Liberation from fear, weakness, and indecision through communion with higher powers or the inner voice.

So even though I don't think I've been doing a great job with it, the Universe seems to think that I am breaking away from my clamoring for adulation and belief that I am a loser if I am not insanely wealthy. 

I am aware that there are people who think that divination tools including the Tarot are "evil" and there are others who think they are silly. I don't think either of those things. You're welcome to think whatever the fuck you think on this subject. I don't intend to argue either way about it with you, so keep that shit to yourself and go write about it on your own blog if you are so inclined. I'm not religious but I'm not an atheist either. I don't have a problem with either atheists or religious people as long as they can be respectful of my agnostic views. 

I was going to do a little more with this, but I've realized that I'm really fucking hungry. I'm trying to (slowly) learn not to ignore my body's needs. I spent so much of my life doing that, starting as a young child when it was done out of necessity. We were really poor when I was little and my father was working towards his doctorate. We often ate horrible shit like boiled soybeans. 

If I never see another boiled soybean in my life, I'll be happy. I like other soy products like tofu. I like roasted soybeans. I cannot abide boiled soybeans. They have the same appeal as cardboard. I could choke down boiled soybeans well before I would ever eat liver and ditto raw squash, however. I love cooked squash but I really can't stand it raw. It tastes like cotton dipped in a little chlorophyll. Liver tastes like a mixture of mud and bile. It's entirely gross. When my mother cooked it, the house smelled of it for days afterward. I always fed my portion to the cat under the table.

After my father got his doctorate, we no longer had to rely on awful boiled soybeans for nutrition. We stepped up from the lower class to the middle class and we were pretty well-fed. Food restriction was still a thing though as my father didn't want to allow any sweets into the house. My father never had the proverbial "sweet tooth." The rest of us liked sweets, though, and when my mother noticed that my brother and I were sneaking candy into our rooms, she put the kibosh on my father's sweets ban.

My father was always very fatphobic, and he engaged in orthorexia, running approximately six miles a day in his prime. He ran in old-school Converse shoes. He was a big man, six foot four and around 200 pounds. Running this much without proper footwear took a toll on his spine over the years. He eventually had to have a laminectomy on several vertebrae in his lower back. By then he was severely physically handicapped because of a stroke. He was relentlessly critical of himself, often referring to himself as a "useless cripple."

I fight not to allow body shaming into my treatment of myself. I need to learn to be okay with eating when I'm hungry without policing my food choices (other than to calculate the amount of insulin I need to eat a portion of food) and without shaming, scolding, or punishing myself for having a large body.

Fuck size shaming and fuck diet culture. These are the only diet books I use.

The Fuck It Diet

https://bit.ly/FIDCIE

Health at Every Size

https://bit.ly/HAESCIE

Here is the book that helps me work on my addiction to approval.

https://amzn.to/3sCWA9q

Spirit of the Universe, please help me to keep working toward self-acceptance. I don't feel like anyone will ever understand or like me and that hurts, but I realize it doesn't mean I'm less worthy of being treated decently, if only by myself. I deserve respect at whatever size I am and whether or not I am famous or wealthy. Please help me to respect myself, Spirit. Amen.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Ornery Owl

Round and All Out of Fucks to Give

Free-Use Image by Open Clipart Vectors

Hangry is ready to chow down!

Free use image from Pixabay

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work is the intellectual property of Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp and Naughty Netherworld Press.

Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. Odysee’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on Odysee. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.

Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.

Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.

Come check out Readers Roost, the online book store featuring works by indie and small press authors. Discover your next great read at the Roost! It's the link you need when you wanna read.

https://bit.ly/ReadersRoost

Buy me a coffee

http://bit.ly/NNPCoffee

Or buy me a coffee here

http://bit.ly/NNPKOFI

Join me on Patreon!

Subscribe for as little as $1 per month.

http://bit.ly/NNPPatreon

Get the latest literary happenings and slices of life in your inbox!

http://bit.ly/NaughtyNetherworldNews

November PAD Chapbook Challenge: Day 10: Tyranny of Perfection

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

so I got to thinking

what if Death 

isn't a grim dude in a black hood

but is instead

an annoyingly perfect and perfectionistic

aerobics instructor

who chirps at you

that it's time to do your cardi-oh-oh

and when you do those leg lifts

you've gotta squeeze those glutes

because if you don't squeeze 'em

no-one else will

and I kind of got to thinking

what if I don't want my life

to revolve around whether or not

some dudebro wants to

play grab-ass with me

and then that chipper death

chirped at me that I

need to mind my carbs and calories

because fat is the very worst thing

that a person can possibly be

and then I got to thinking

that maybe that's not true

that in fact the worst thing a person

can possibly be

is a sanctimonious twat

who refuses to respect

other people's lives and conditions and preferences

and bodily autonomy

and who really can just fuck off

and then I got to wondering 

if maybe that's the way Death works

is by annoying people to death

by making them fight all day every day

with vicious inner voices

that tell them they're no good

because they have dimpled thighs

or chunky butts

or saggy boobs

or tummy rolls

or they just aren't perky-werky enough

and then I got to thinking 

that maybe what happens

is people get tired 

of hearing Death's annoying voice

bleating at them to get up and at 'em

because nobody who isn't perfect

deserves to have a life

and so they smash the snooze bar

on their internal clock

one too many times

in an attempt to shut the annoying bitch up

once and for all

~Cie~

Notes:

Today's November PAD Chapbook Challenge asked for a (blank) of (blank) poem. I initially went with "hands of time," which is how I found the image of the perky aerobics instructor looking lady with her watch. I started thinking about all the years and time and money I spent trying to hate myself thin, and it really pissed me off that the message people (especially women) are sent from the moment we draw breath isn't "take care of yourself because you are worthwhile regardless of your size or looks," it's "if you girls aren't thin and pretty in a very specific way, you are garbage and don't deserve happiness." 

So, I changed the title of my poem to Tyranny of Perfection and wrote about what it feels like to fight with the hateful internal dialogue that has been crammed down my throat for as long as I can remember. It would be nice to be able to just BE, without having to fight with these horrible messages from the cradle to the grave. Doing so is the biggest fucking waste of time and a waste of a perfectly good life too.

Fat Friday #12: How to get Fat Acceptance Completely Wrong

Cie takes a step back and leaves today's Fat Friday post to her politically incorrect alter-ego, Sly Fawkes.

I recently read a rant by a young (thin) woman proclaiming that fat liberation shouldn't intersect with feminism because fat liberation is all about desperate fat women wanting to force men to think they are beautiful.

First, no.

Second, what the fuck?

This young lady has confused Ashley Graham curvysexalicious (yes, Ashley actually referred to herself that way) Fun Empowered Free the Nipple Liberal Feminism For Plus Size Babes with real fat liberation or fat acceptance. Sadly, I thought she had something on the ball before she wrote this steaming, hateful pile of nonsense.

Real fat acceptance has fuck all to do with wanting to force men to think fat women are beautiful.

Most of us fat women give this many fucks about having some contingent of pea-brained douchebros think we're beautiful.

Here is what fat acceptance is actually concerned with, and I think these issues are very much feminist concerns. While fat men suffer too in a thin-centric society, there is additional pressure placed on fat women for not conforming to misogynistic and unrealistic standards of hotness. Racism and classism also come into play in the thinness equates with beauty while fatness equates with slovenliness, commonness, and undesirability screed. The Slender White Woman is held up as the ideal by women's magazines. Men's magazines also hold up the Slender White Woman as the ideal, while insisting that she also have impossibly large yet perky breasts.

Fat acceptance is concerned with the fact that fat people tend to not receive adequate medical care. Doctors prescribe weight loss for every problem imaginable while not listening to the patient's actual concerns. Since women's concerns tend to be dismissed as it is, this goes doubly for fat women. The case of Ellen Maud Bennett may seem extreme but is sadly far more common than people realize. 

Ellen was a 64-year-old Canadian woman who died from ovarian cancer, which could have been treatable if it had been addressed in its early stages. She had been feeling ill for years, but doctors never did anything beyond telling her to lose weight. Shame on all of them. They should all be held accountable for her death.

In my own case, I did not have a pelvic exam for close to thirty years, in part due to past sexual trauma, in part due to fear that I would be shamed for my body. I only went to an OB/GYN within the past two years because of post-menopausal bleeding, which turned out to be due to simple endometrial hyperplasia with normal cells. As this only raises the risk of endometrial cancer to 1.6 percent greater than the risk for someone who has no hyperplasia, I have opted against a hysterectomy (the recommended procedure) at this time. If I had presented with complex hyperplasia or abnormal cells, which raise the risk of endometrial cancer to 36% greater than a woman with no hyperplasia, I would have had the hysterectomy.

The appalling treatment of larger people, particularly larger women, by the current size-shaming medical system should definitely be a feminist concern. I give no fucks if some dumb dudebro finds me attractive. I want my health concerns to be taken seriously when I seek medical treatment. I do not want medical professionals to dismiss me as either "hysterical" because I am a woman or a pariah because I am fat.

Fat people tend to be passed over for promotions, that is if they are hired at all. Discrimination against fat applicants means that fat people are more likely to live in poverty. Given that women already have strikes against us when seeking employment, fat women face even greater discrimination. I would say that is very definitely a feminist concern.

Just because a small number of plus-size models describe themselves using dumb terms like "curvysexalicious" and a few (understandably) angry big women make the regrettable error of posting "real women have curves" or "only dogs want bones" types of memes does not erase the real goals and real concerns of the fat acceptance/fat liberation movement. By the way, don't post those memes. They're ignorant. Nobody should be shamed for their body type. And you can refer to yourself as "curvysexalicious" if you want, but I'm gonna give you the side-eye if you do.

All fat people face stigmatization and discrimination. Fat women get an extra helping of discrimination for not adhering to arbitrary and unrealistic standards of beauty. These are absolutely issues which should be addressed by the feminist movement. Unless feminism is only for thin women, which is what some "feminists" seem to be implying.

Also, the assertion that fat liberation only concerns itself with forcing men to think fat women are beautiful makes me wonder if the individual making that (inane) statement is unaware that there are fat women of the non-straight persuasion. 

Guess there have never been any fat bisexual or lesbian feminists. Nope, can't think of a single one.

Radass Badass Andrea Dworkin (26 September 1946 - 9 April 2005)

Apparently a figment of fevered feminist imagination.

As Andrea Dworkin once said, "if an ignoramus you are, speak you should not."

Oh, wait. That was Yoda.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Image copyright juliahenze @123rf.com

Crazy Creative Cheerleading Camp's Come As You Are Party

Image by Prawny from Pixabay

I participate in a fair number of blog hops. For a couple of months, I have been participating in blog hops that tend to be fashion oriented. While I found a couple of people whose blogs I now follow, I have decided that I am going to back away from the fashion blog hops. Most of them have a strong emphasis on being pretty in a very narrow way, on "fitness" as it relates to weight loss rather than to overall well-being, and on size normativity rather than size acceptance. 

These blogs made me fall back into the negative pattern of hating myself for being The Outsider rather than being a welcoming space. So I think it's time to have a blog party here at the Camp which welcomes the Outsiders to come out and play!

You can share anything you want at the Come As You Are Party. You can share photography, writing, recipes, your daily life with disabilities physical or psychological, and, yes, even fashion. I'm not big on rules, but if this is going to work, there need to be a few caveats.

Shared posts cannot contain pro diet talk or pro-weight loss talk. They cannot contain fat shaming or thin praising. They can't be about "flattering" attire. Flattering is code for "hiding the unacceptable parts of your body." I get pissed off when I try to buy a swimsuit and the manufacturer thinks that terms like "hip hider" or "tummy tamer" are going to make me want to buy their product. Fuck that shit. 

I'm still not sure what my "tummy" might be doing that requires it to be tamed. Granted, my IBS sometimes flares up at inopportune moments and renders me an unhappy camper. Other than that, my "tummy" has never bitten anyone, and I guarantee that it's had its shots. I inject insulin into my abdomen multiple times on any given day.

Posts can discuss dieting and weight loss as it relates to the problems they have caused. You are welcome to share posts about how diet culture negatively impacts you, about eating disorders, about weight fluctuations due to medical conditions, about your struggles to accept your body as it is rather than trying to make it be something it doesn't want to be. I developed an eating disorder at twelve years of age. I tried to hate myself thin for 33 years. I struggle with the fact that food insecurity means that the part of my brain which thinks it's good for me to starve gets amped up and keeps encouraging me to starve even when I have food. It's fucking horrible what society does to people, and we should be able to talk about that.

The posts I don't want to see and will remove links to contain subject matter such as "my weight loss journey!" "My journey to a slim new me!" "I lost 666 Kilos and now look like Skeletor's Sexy Sister!" "I'm on the new Keto Paleo Cabbage Soup Juice Fast Death Cleanse And My Bones Evaporated But I Look Really Hot," or "How my Spanx Hides the Fat on my Ass So I Look 25 Pounds Thinner, Never mind That I Feel Like I'm Wrapped In A Sausage Casing." 

That shit is not "inspirational." That shit promotes eating disorders. I'm not saying you can't write that shit. I am a firm believer in The Underpants Rule, which states that you are the boss of your own underpants. However, I refuse to be a party to promoting toxic, size-shaming beliefs.

A lot of blog hops insist that you only share "family friendly" posts. I really don't think there are a lot of young children reading the posts on this blog. You can share pretty much whatever you want, except for the types of posts mentioned above and hardcore porno pictures. This is a "Come As You Are" party, so, come as you are!

I should have a Mr. Linky next week. This week, please post your link in the comments. Apologies to those who don't have a Google account and don't want to get one. I've had problems with trolls in the past and am not up to dealing with their bullshit, which tends to run rampant when I allow anonymous comments.

~Cie~

A Fat Bitch With A Bad Attitude Attitude Committed to Providing Alternatives to Fucked-Up Mainstream Culture Whenever Possible

Cie and Crowley welcome you

Inspire Me Monday (on Tuesday) #211: My Wait Problem

Copyright Taro Vesalainen

Inspire Me Monday is a new blog hop that I've just discovered. So, even though this is post #211 for them, it's my first one. 

I'm going to play nice and keep this post family-friendly, with the caveat that my blog is not entirely family-friendly. There are no naughty bits here, but there is cussing. That is how I roll.

With the realization that I am not a petite delicate flower and that buttah does indeed melt in my mouth and I am on the opposite end of the spectrum from nice and normal, you may be wondering what in the blazes kind of role model I am and how in the Universe I could possibly inspire you.

Well...

I do not claim that I can inspire everybody or even anybody at all if you want the truth. However, if you are like me and get absolutely nothing from reading cheery platitudes by shiny happy people because you know you are the furthest thing from being what they are, then I may just be the bundle of snark that you need to light a fire under your butt and get you on the road to success, your way.

You see, I was sidelined for many years by being unpretty and unskinny and having a brain that was trying to kill me. I had a very serious Wait problem. Like most girls of my generation and the generations before and possibly the generations since, I was fed a line which involved living Happily Ever After. But since I was unpretty and unskinny and Not Normal, I had to Wait. 

First of all, I had to Wait for the Handsome Prince (TM) that was going to come and rescue me, because, you see, Girls are Petite Delicate Flowers who cannot handle making their own way in the world. They will need a Handsome Prince (TM) to fight the Beasties that live in the Wild Wood. 

However, before setting out to catch a Handsome Prince (TM) I needed to Wait until I became Slim and Pretty. Because a Handsome Prince (TM) will never see fit to rescue a maid who is unskinny and unpretty. 

The years went by while I attempted to become Slim and Pretty. There was a prince or knight or something who liked me well enough and I liked him well enough. It wasn't love, but we did have a son, who isn't normal--he's better. The prince or knight or whatever and I ended up divorcing, but we got along better afterward (as friends, not romantically) and became a Forever Family together with our son.

I did not, however, live Happily Ever After. I was still unskinny and unpretty and my brain was still a mess, and I was still Waiting to catch a Handsome Prince (TM) to save me from myself. I never did catch a Handsome Prince (TM), but I did let quite a few Knaves into my life before realizing that my son didn't deserve to be exposed to these abusive not-gentlemen, and, in fact, neither did I. So I stopped waiting for the Handsome Prince (TM). 

It would take a while longer for me to stop Waiting to be Slim and Pretty before living my life. Then one day when I was 45 years old, I was hit upside the head with a couple of bricks. One was called Health at Every Size. The other was called Size Acceptance. A bright golden light shone down on me as I realized that it was not necessary to be Slim and Pretty to pursue my goals. It wasn't even necessary to be young, which was a good thing, because I'd left that attribute lying in a ditch years ago.

Unfortunately, I still believed that I needed to be Adored in order to be Successful. I gauged the worth of my writing on whether I got a lot of comments. I gauged my own worth on whether I got compliments. I was often left disappointed and sullen. Despite shedding so much Wait, I was clearly still suffering from a tremendous Wait problem.

I needed to make a critical decision: either accept the fact that my work will never appeal to the mainstream, or stop writing altogether. Since I become a tremendously sullen sod when I don't write, I decided to stop caring about the opinions of others, whether it be their opinions of my writing or their opinions of me personally. 

At that moment, a great, rotting albatross and a millstone lifted from my neck, and I felt as free as I did as a young child writing and drawing and giving no rips what anyone else thought of my creations, simply enjoying the act of creating them.

At this point, I engage in a few different types of writing. One is non-fiction writing, such as what I have done here. This type of writing divides into subtypes. One is promotional writing, the other is anecdotal and possibly encouraging in nature, such as this post. The more sanitized posts appear on the Deliver Me blog and sometimes the Horror Harridans Writing Sisterhood blog. The more raw and dark examples of this writing can be found on the Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp blog.

I also write and edit fiction, which, again, divides into two categories. There is work slated for publication. You can view examples of this kind of writing on the Horror Harridans Writing Sisterhood blog.

I write poetry as well, but this tends to be confined to two times a year: April and October. The NaPoWriMo blog hop takes place in April and the OctPoWriMo takes place in--you guessed it--October.

On the Deliver Me blog, I also share ways to make a bit of extra income. I do not claim that I am any sort of expert, only that I have learned a few things over the years, and I would like to share them with you in case they might help you too.

I am not an expert of any kind. I don't offer up soothing platitudes, either religious or otherwise. I am an agnostic and prefer to keep my spiritual beliefs and theories separate from my business writing. I have had a difficult life and, while I'm less overtly angry than I was when I was younger, I can't say I've completely accepted the things that have transpired in my life, even if I do understand them better. I have not been "cured" of my psychological dysfunctions, I have simply learned to cope with them. I am not here to tell you "feel good" stories or to tell you that it's all going to be okay because I don't know if it is or not.

So, how in Hades can someone like me possibly inspire you?

As I said before, it's quite possible that I can't. However, while I can't make everything right for you, what I can offer you is this: 

Honesty.

Not just honesty about the products or earning opportunities I may recommend. 

Honesty about myself and the world as I see it. 

No rose-colored glasses.

Just bare-bones, bare-knuckled honesty.

It's unpretty, but it's real.

Personally, I've never gotten anything out of saccharine platitudes. If you don't either, you may find me a--dare I say--inspiring change of pace.

This is how I may be able to inspire you.

~Cie~

Cross-Posted to:

Crazy Creatives Cheerleading Camp

Deliver Me

Horror Harridans Writing Sisterhood

Netherworld Writers Guild

One Love